WSJ: “Founders have long put in punishing hours in the name of building the next big thing. But the growing capabilities of AI agents—and the speed at which the models powering them are evolving—give new meaning to working yourself to the bone. The more work AI agents do, the more founders find themselves working. Add to that the pressure of what many view as a once-in-humanity moment in technology and you get erratic sleep schedules, a struggle to focus on anything but work, and the feeling that even though the pace isn’t healthy or sustainable, you just can’t stop.”
James Grant: “The Smithian doctrines of 1776 live mainly today between the covers of dusty books. The ideals of free trade, untrammeled enterprise, sound public finance and currencies convertible on demand into gold or silver have virtually reversed 180 degrees. In this, however, may lie the hope for a revival. In the realm of economic ideas, all is cyclical and nothing is permanent, neither the good nor the bad.”
NYTimes: “Where “trivia” was self-effacing, “lore” is epic, or at least mock-epic. It gives minor factoids the feeling of magical incantations, perhaps read off forbidden scrolls from a sorcerer’s library. Fittingly, “lore” is a very old word. It shares a Germanic root with “learn.” In Old English, lore was knowledge, anything that was taught or learned — facts, morals, doctrine. Early modern English retained this meaning. In “Paradise Lost,” lore is, among other things, the reasoned voice of good sense, tragically unheeded: after Milton’s Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, “Understanding rul’d not, and the Will / Heard not her lore.” Still, at the threshold of modernity, the word started to acquire an archaic mouthfeel. It became a word more suitable for talking about bygone days: “Grecian” or “Roman lore”; the “legendary lore” of the remote past. Faintly, almost imperceptibly, lore began to flicker somewhere between hard fact and mythic tale.”
Neelkanth Mishra: “In India, even though net FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) is slow, gross inbound FDI is still going up. India is reaching a stage where some companies are so large that the only way to grow is outside India. So outbound FDI is also picking up. When you put all of this together, sustaining 1 per cent of GDP of current account deficit is also a strategic choice. Our choice used to be 2-3 per cent; that may be hard to execute now. Therefore, I think some of the amendments, ordinances, and the fact that we have now opened up a lot more to foreign bond funds are important. Maybe the area where a lot of investment needs to happen is urbanisation and private capital mobilisation, which is also a World Bank priority. We need to absorb the fact that the global environment has changed… We have to think like a proper power: everything is not about us and that people don’t like us. It is a reality that this is how water flows; the gradient is not good enough, let’s try to make it good enough.”
